Of the Vista of the alcohol it is

Perhaps because I grew up bilingual, I have always been very fond of machine translation stories. I posted my favorite machine translation joke a long time ago, so I won't repeat it here. It's amusing, though, that real life now approximates my joke, as you see from the Lost in Translation web site:

What happens when an English phrase is translated (by computer) back and forth between 5 different languages? The authors of the Systran translation software probably never intended this application of their program. As of September 2003, translation software is almost good enough to turn grammatically correct, slang-free text from one language into grammatically incorrect, barely readable approximations in another. But the software is not equipped for 10 consecutive translations of the same piece of text. The resulting half-English, half-foreign, and totally non sequitur response bears almost no resemblance to the original. Remember the old game of “Telephone”? Something is lost, and sometimes something is gained. Try it for yourself!

It's not a true game of multilingual 'telephone' since it translates the phrase back into English before each iteration instead of being a true round-robin, but it's nevertheless amusing to see what happens when you take a phrase like “out of sight, out of mind” and run it through five different translations:

No, no, nononononono. The RIGHT version of the joke (meaning the one I heard first, and that I like better) isn’t “Blind Drunk”… it’s “Invisible Idiot.” Out of Sight, Out of Mind.

It’s not a common phrase, but it’s much funnier. Drunk’s got a nasty, onomatopoeic *thunk* sound to it, and blind is either furniture or a slur on the differently visioned. But invisible is an intrinsically funny word- see MP, Dead Parrot Sketch: “run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisibule!” [yes, i know I wrote invisibule, and that most folks transcribe it ‘properly’ as invisible; i know what they said and how they said it]

Old joke. Shmuel Shambursky, a philosopher of science, told a lecture audience (Columbia, NY City 1970 or so; I was there) of the translation of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ into ‘invisible idiot’ by computer.